


Ravished By the Vampire Highwayman

by buckgaybarnes



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: (rating for descriptions of the romance novels lol), (s), Erotica, Getting Together, M/M, No Sex, Romance Novel, Romance Novelist Hermann, but everything's still the same
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-07
Updated: 2019-03-07
Packaged: 2019-11-13 04:23:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18024611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckgaybarnes/pseuds/buckgaybarnes
Summary: Newt stumbles upon Hermann's secret stash of erotic romance novels, and they raise a lot of questions—namely, why all the romantic leads are disconcertingly similar to the two of them.(or: newt accidentally finds out about hermann's side job)





	Ravished By the Vampire Highwayman

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skeleton_twins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skeleton_twins/gifts).



> somewhat early birthday gift for my excellent friend erica, who tweeted about romance novelist/erotica writer hermann (and the following concept) ages ago, which i LOVED, and i figured her birthday is as good a time as any to write it for her! happy bday erica i love you and i hope you like this!!!
> 
> as a side note: i had the time of my life thinking of titles and shit for the romance novels. also herm's pseud definitely came from me mashing together two of burn's other charas' names

Newt doesn’t usually make a habit of reading the kind of shitty paperback erotica you can find in the seedy underbelly of Amazon or at any bargain store in bulk. He doesn’t make a habit of reading, period. Way too busy with other shit. But he’s staying late in the lab tonight, waiting for some samples to finish up in the centrifuge, and—in a fit of boredom—he started combing through Hermann’s desk drawers to find something to entertain himself. He was expecting, and hoping for, some books of crosswords or Sudoku (the kind that Hermann always does as he drinks his coffee in the morning), maybe a Rubik's cube or wooden puzzle or something, but he doesn’t find anything remotely like that. He finds some pencil stubs (erasers chewed on—how charmingly gross), what looks to be an ancient Gottlieb family photograph (Hermann and his siblings, no older than their teens, with their arms stiff at their sides and dressed like they all go to the same depressing boarding school), some near-fossilized and moldering orange peels (he tips those into the trash can, Hermann can thank him later).

Most bewildering, and most _interesting_ , of all: a stack of pristine, meticulously organized romance novels in the bottom drawer, all with covers featuring some variation of a barrel-chested hunk in a state of undress either holding up another swooning man or swooning into another man's arms himself. There's gotta be at least two dozen.

Newt crows with delight when he finds them. “Holy shit, Hermann,” he whistles.

He flips through one—called _Plucked By the Gardener_ —and nearly blushes. This shit is _raunchy_. Definitely a little more so than what you’d find in a bookstore bargain bin. It’s full-on erotica. And all by the same author, a quick double-check confirms, a William Harper. He must be Hermann’s favorite author.

_He held me in his strong, tattooed arms, dirty from his hard work, so close that I could hear his heart pounding in his muscular chest. Sweat glistened on his forehead. “Herbert,” he whispered, in his scratchy voice, “I want to make love to you.”_

_My knees trembled. I wanted to rip my clothing from my body, to bare myself open for him, to feel his pulsating, turgid member pushing into me and plucking the flower of my virginity. But it was wrong—and we both knew it. I was a gentleman, poised to inherit a grand estate; he was nothing more than a penniless gardener, employed by my wealthy father for the summer. How could I ever give into my desire for someone like **him**?_

Newt gets so...uh, _engrossed_ in the story of the beguiled aristocrat and his hunky gardener lover (with _tattoos_ , even) that he almost doesn’t hear the alarm for his centrifuge go off at first. He debates marking his place with a bent corner (he just reached a very exciting part where the two dudes started going at it in some delicately-sculpted hedges), but decides he _really_ doesn’t want Hermann to know he’s been prowling through his top-secret erotica stash, so he puts everything back as meticulously as he found it. Even the orange peels.

Who’s he to begrudge Hermann for how he gets his rocks off, you know? Newt’s got his glittery alien dildos and occasional fantasies about Jeff Goldblum (and, okay, fantasies about Hermann), Hermann’s got his cheesy florid period-piece gay erotica. That he also keeps in the lab. Which is, you know, maybe actually kind of weird, now that Newt thinks about it. Newt attends to his intimate affairs _far_ away from the lab, not in the least because the sheer amount of hazardous materials lying around are not anything he wants anywhere near his genitalia. It just...feels weird, somehow, to do it in the same place he works. Less relaxing. Someone, including Hermann, could barge in at any moment.

But whatever. Hermann’s an eccentric guy. Maybe his chalkboards get him _excited_.

 

* * *

  

It goes without question that Newt doesn’t mention his discovery to Hermann the next day; he doesn't want to embarrass the guy, you know. He waits until Hermann finally calls it a night—until the echo of Hermann’s cane on the metal floor finally recedes down the hall—before he rips off his gloves and headlamp and starts rifling through Hermann's erotica stash again to find the same novel as the previous night. He’s invested in the slutty gardener story, so sue him.

Newt locks the lab door just to be sure of his privacy.

_His rough hands undressed me quickly, my buttons flying free as he ripped my shirt open right down the middle. “Touch me,” I breathed. His warm, supple lips found mine, and his tongue pushed past them, tasting me._

Newt skims ahead to the good stuff. For fucking in a shrub, it’s fairly vanilla. There are a lot of cries of passion, of _grasping arousals_ in tightly-clenched fists, some graphic descriptions of  _slick_ tongues _battling for dominance_.

But one thing that does pique Newt’s interest is the description of the characters. The gardener—who Newt never picked up on the name of—is described in way _disconcertingly_ like him. (Nothing at all like the hunk on the cover.) Aside from the vaguely alluded-to tattoos, he’s got messy brown hair and stubble, and he’s at least a few inches shorter than the aristocrat. Then there’s the aristocrat, _Herbert_ , with his dark hair, his angular features, and his brass-headed  _cane._

It’s like reading about him and Hermann having sex. To Newt’s abject horror, that just kind of...makes him more into it.

He shuts _Plucked By the Gardener_ and shoves it back into its rightful spot in Hermann's desk. He’s had enough of it tonight.

 

* * *

 

“Are you alright?” Hermann says the next morning. “You’ve been awfully quiet today.”

“Just—sleepy,” Newt says. “That’s all.”

It's not completely a lie. Newt was up for half the night replaying moments from that fucking _book_ over and over, though with minor alterations, aka, he and Hermann in the starring roles instead. Newt as the penniless gardener dirtying up rich prettyboy Hermann after dark. It was too easy to imagine ripping Hermann’s clothing off him like that, too easy to imagine hoisting Hermann up into his arms and kissing him—sorry, letting their tongues _battle for dominance_. He was only able to get to sleep by jerking off, and even that just left him feeling mildly guilty. Like he's somehow breached Hermann's trust.

Hermann remains clearly skeptical. “If you’re sure,” he says.

Newt wants to ask him about the book. It's gotta be a total coincidence—there's no way Hermann willingly and purposely sought out erotica featuring men _uncomfortably similar_ to them. He probably only bought it because Harper wrote it. The rest are undoubtedly different. Newt would read through a few more tonight to prove it to himself.

 

This next one Newt cracks open is called _Taming the Rogue_ , and it’s even more of a bodice-ripper than _Plucked By the Gardener_. 

_To see the rogue brought to his knees before me, arms bound by his own silk cravat, his eyeglasses slipping down his nose, and begging for my touch, was erotic in a way I had not anticipated. I parted his soft thighs. “Take me,” he begged, his entrance quivering._  (Newt cringed here.) _“Please—”_

_He was tight around my arousal, his cries growing louder, sharper, his already shrill voice higher. I clenched my fingers around one tattooed arm._

More fucking tattoos. Newt shuts the book quickly. The next one, _Sleeping With the Professor,_  features a young graduate student seducing his equally young biology instructor in order to get a better grade in his class (only to, of course, end up falling in love).

_“Oh, Doctor,” I moaned helplessly, as the biologist took my shaft between his plump pink lips. I tangled my fingers in his wild brown hair: how strange a sensation, how wonderful, how intense. I felt as though my soul had left my body, sucked straight out through_ —

“Are you in there, Newton?” Hermann calls.

Newt throws the book back into the drawer, slams it shut, and leaps back over to his side of the lab to strike a casual pose (hands in his pockets) just as the heavy lab door swings open and reveals a pajama-clad Hermann. Hermann immediately narrows his eyes in suspicion upon seeing him. “What are you doing here?” he says.

“What are  _you_ doing here?” Newt fires back. “I thought you went to bed.”

“I forgot my glasses,” Hermann says, and points towards his desk, where they sit (librarian chain and all) atop some paperwork; belatedly, Newt realizes half of the cover of _Sleeping With the Professor_ is sticking out from Hermann's drawer and keeping it from shutting properly. Hermann can’t see it from where he stands in the doorway, but the moment he takes a few steps to the right it’ll be on full display. Newt leaps into action.

“I got it, dude,” he half-shouts, and he swipes the glasses and offers them out to Hermann before Hermann has the chance to move a single muscle.

Hermann blinks at him, then takes the glasses slowly. “Er, alright then, Newton,” he says. “Thank you.”

“Sure thing,” Newt says.

Hermann does not leave.

“You, uh, need anything else?” Newt says.

Hermann’s eyes dart over to his desk, then back to Newt. “Er, no,” he says. “I suppose not.” He slips his glasses chain around his neck and stifles a small yawn. (Newt's instantly endeared.) In a moment of surprising, candid concern, he adds, “Are you going to bed soon, Newton? You really shouldn’t work 'til such ungodly hours. It’s not good for you.”

Newt feels a little surge of guilt, and then realizes how ridiculous that is of him. _Hermann’s_ the one jerking off in the _lab_ to erotica that could very well star Newt. “Yeah, uh, five minutes,” Newt says. “I have to finish making a few more...notes.”

Hermann doesn't seem to totally buy it, but he nods and turns on his heels and Newt's left alone.

The cover of _Taming the Rogue_ isn’t bent, thank fuck, when Newt goes to fix the drawer and arrange everything perfectly, and he flees to his own bedroom not long after. That was definitely too close.

Newt resolves to do more research into William Harper in his own time. Or, at the very least, not where Hermann could walk in at any moment.

William Harper has a fucking extensive catalogue of gay erotica, a Google search reveals (once Newt’s brushed his teeth and stripped down to his boxers), apparently a real big player in the genre. Newt recognizes every single title as one from Hermann’s desk. Hermann’s not just a fan—he’s _obsessed_. Harper's books are all fairly cheap, no more than a few bucks each (with free international shipping, which is the real deal-breaker), so Newt sees no real reason to not order the complete collection and have it sent to him pronto.

 

* * *

 

The collection comes in by the end of the month, and on a Friday, which is perfect: Newt can devote the whole weekend to the task at hand.

Other than _Plucked By the Gardener, Taming the Rogue,_ and _Sleeping With the Professor_ , there’s—notably— _The Tattooed Scot_ (a tale set in the Highlands, starring a slutty bagpipe player in a short kilt who’s far more interested in blowing the other male lead than on his instrument), _Ravished By the Pirate King_ (pretty self-explanatory), _A Groom for the Pirate King_ (the titillating sequel), _The Highwayman’s Kiss_ (this one has three sword fights, and Newt’s not even being euphemistic, which is pretty sweet), _Ravished By The Vampire Highwayman_ (Newt thinks Harper may have been running out of material), and _The Nobleman and the Scholar_ (some weird _Jane Eyre_ bullshit where a wealthy young widower, following the death of his husband, hires a mathematician to move in and tutor his young daughter, and then the widower and the scholar go at it on multiple desks). This last one is particularly interesting to Newt, on account of both the nobleman’s deceased husband sharing a name with Newt’s last boyfriend and the frankly _loving_ descriptions of various advanced math theorems throughout that (Newt decides) probably _really_ got Hermann’s blood pumping.

The lead guy is always dark-haired and wielding a cane. The other is always tattooed and bespectacled. More often than not, their jobs are _very_ similar (if not flat-out identical) to Newt and Hermann's. Newt doesn’t bother touching the rest of the stack, which features (judging by the covers) at least two other vampires, another masked bandit with a heart of gold, and some sort of space alien. He’s pretty sure it’ll be more of the same.

There’s only one conclusion to be drawn from this, Newt reasons: Hermann is deliberately seeking out porn that allows him to easily fantasize about getting it on with Newt. Ergo, Hermann wants to get it on with Newt.

(It’s really no different than Newt, hypothetically, searching Pornhub for _dark-haired scientist fucks twink lab partner_ in fits of weepy horniness from time to time. Just slightly more literary.)

There’s probably an elegant way to deal with this; unfortunately, Newt has never been one for elegance.

Newt brings _The Siren’s Song_ —basically The Little Mermaid, but horny, wherein an astronomer is rescued by a handsome merman—to work with him the next day and waits until Hermann’s deeply engrossed in his numbers before he kicks his feet up on his desk and cracks it open to a page at random. It's one of the good parts.

_The merman’s lips were cool, and salty, like the ocean he came from, and I ached to feel them over every inch of my skin, marking and claiming me as his mate. He shivered as I skimmed my fingertips along the iridescent scales of his tail. “Do that again,” he sighed, and his eyelids flickered over his emerald orbs._

Newt skims ahead a paragraph or two. He clears his throat.

“Pleasure rod,” he says.

Hermann’s chalk squeaks to a halt. “I _beg_ your pardon?” he says.

“Oh, sorry,” Newt says. “I’m just reading a book.”

Hermann turns his head slowly. He's gone pale. “A book?”

Newt waves _The Siren’s Song_ at him. Hermann goes a fraction paler. “Did you know people write merman erotica? Pretty hot stuff.”

“Ah,” Hermann says. “How...fascinating.”

“No, for real,” Newt says. “Listen. ‘ _I plunged my pleasure rod between the scales of the merman, and he writhed—_ ’”

“Ah,” Hermann says again. “Er. Yes.” He coughs. He coughs again. He pulls his glasses on and off twice. “Is now the time for that, Newton?”

Newt grins, and he holds up a half-eaten sandwich. “Hey, man, I’m on my lunch break.”

Hermann works his jaw furiously. “If you could read _silently_ , then.” He lifts his chalk back to his board and draws half a seven, then turns again. “...Is there something wrong with that phrase?”

“What phrase?” Newt says

“What you just said.”

“Oh.” Newt grins. “You mean _pleasure rod_?”

“Oh, nevermind,” Hermann sighs. He begins scrawling more furiously than before.

Newt has to commend Hermann for not cracking. He definitely would’ve by now. “Are you not going to ask, then?”

“I’m sure I don't know what you mean,” Hermann says.

Newt tosses  _The Siren's Song_  onto the desk and gets to his feet. Hermann is watching him, nervously, over his shoulder. “There were an awful lot of those in your desk, Hermann.”

“Ah,” Hermann says, and Newt strides ever-closer. “Well. Yes, Newton, see—”

Newt leans against Hermann’s chalkboard with his arms folded, but not before plucking the piece of chalk from Hermann's hand and setting it on the ledge. “Why are you reading erotica about guys who are _basically_  us, dude?”

A very odd look crosses Hermann’s face, and all his nervous tension seems leave him at once. “Oh, Newton, you quite misunderstand,” he says, and lets out a huff of laughter. “I’m not reading it. Don’t be so crass.”

Newt frowns. “You’re not?”

“Of _course_ not,” Hermann says. “I’m writing it.”

Newt startles so hard he slips and loses his balance against the chalkboard; it takes him a few seconds to recover. “You’re _writing_ it?” he splutters.

“Well, yes,” Hermann says. Newt gapes at him. Hermann rolls his eyes. “It’s really not that strange, Newton. We needed to make some extra money, so I came up with a pseudonym—”

“So you wrote  _porn_ about me?”

“Technically, about both of us,” Hermann says. “It was easier than coming up with new characters.” To his credit, he sounds mildly apologetic. “I really didn’t believe you’d ever find out. Or mind.” He adjusts his glasses and squints at Newt inquisitively. “Do you mind?”

Newt isn’t sure what to say. The strange amount of funding they’ve had recently makes sense now, he supposes. Still. “You wrote porn about me,” he repeats, weakly.

“And _you_ went out and bought your own copies,” Hermann says. “The ones in my drawers are proofs. That one—” He nods towards Newt’s desk. “—is not.” He sniffs and squares his shoulders. “You know how I feel about you snooping through my personal belongings, Newton.”

“Yeah,” Newt says. He rubs the back of his neck. “Well. Uh. I was...curious.”

Hermann is silent for a few moments. Then, out of nowhere, he asks, “Did you have a favorite?”

“Favorite?” Newt stutters out. “Like, favorite story?” Hermann nods. Well, what the hell. “The vampire ones are kinda hot,” he confesses, and Hermann smiles.

“I like those too,” he says.

To his surprise, Newt feels the oddest surge of disappointment. Hermann wasn't actually having wild fantasies about him after all. “So, uh. It was just for convenience, then? You don’t…?”

“Convenience?” Hermann echoes, and then says, “Oh! Yes. That was—the only reason.” He catches sight of Newt’s expression. “Unless,” he adds, cautiously, “you—?”

“Isn’t it kind of obvious?” Newt says. “I just read about eight of those fucking things.”

“Yes,” Hermann says, and he looks quite pleased. “You did, didn’t you?”

This isn’t quite how Newt anticipated this conversation going, but it's not bad. He briefly entertains the idea of kissing Hermann (because, apparently, Hermann would be into that) before settling on something much more important. “Gotta say, though,” he says, “your euphemisms could use a little bit of help.”

Hermann frowns. “How so?”

“Pleasure rod,” Newt says.

Hermann has the decency to look embarrassed. “Yes, well, it's not _Shakespeare_.”

“No fucking kidding,” Newt snorts. “But listen. I can help you with it, yeah?” He pats Hermann’s arm, and he doesn’t bother moving his hand afterwards. “Maybe with some hands-on demonstrations.” Consulting on accuracy and all that shit.

“Hands-on,” Hermann echoes. Newt waggles his eyebrows. “ _Oh_! Yes.”

 

* * *

 

Hermann’s sales increase after Newt lends his help. He celebrates, to Newt's delight, by taking him out for dinner.

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr at hermannsthumb (where i post more ficlets and take requests), twitter at hermanngaylieb, secret nsfw 18+ twitter (where i post newmann wip snippets and doc links for as yet unposted newmann fic) at hermanngayszler!


End file.
